The objective of this project is to analyze data on the relationship between black and white speech of comparable socio-economic groups in the deep South. Over 100 tapes of interviews conducted under NIMH Grant No.23292-01 will be analyzed in their description. Independent linguistic and social constraints will be isolated and correlated with the observed linguistic variation. The social constraints of ethnicity, age, sex, contextual style, class and the race of the interviewer will all be examined using a quantitative paradigm. A number of the critical linguistic variables will be examined in an effort to resolve some of the questions about the relationship of rural Southern white and black speech. These include copula absence, invariant be, tense marking, possession, and negative concord, among others. Current sociolinguistic models will be utilized in formalizing the description. For non-categorical data, variable rules will be employed with appropriate modifications in their formulations. In addition, implicational arrays will be set up in an effort to formalize the notion of dialect grouping with respect to the observed linguistic variation.